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If your like me, you and your friends have several machines running Ubuntu, Kubuntu, or other *buntu variants. After going through upgrades of all these machines, it can eat a lot of your and Canonical’s bandwidth to download all the packages for each machine. There are other solutions such as apt-proxy, apt-cacher, etc. But what works best for me is apt-mirror, which creates a mirror of any Ubuntu, Debian, or any other deb repository. So if you have 20+ GB of hard drive space, you can setup a local repository mirror to speed up the upgrading process and save Canonical some bandwidth.

Step 1: Install apt-mirror

sudo apt-get install apt-mirror (Universe repository needed)

Step 2: Configure apt-mirror

Configuring apt-mirror is fairly simple. We just need to modify the /etc/apt/mirror.list file.

NOTE: Make SURE whatever partition stores your /var/spool directory has plenty of space. Trust me, you do NOT want to download 17GB and find out your partition doesn’t have enough space. If you use a separate /home partition with storage capacity you want to use for apt-mirror, you can do what I did by creating a /home/apt-mirror and making /var/spool/apt-mirror link to it. That can be done with these two commands:
ONLY DO THIS IF YOU HAVE THE SAME SITUATION AS ABOVE!
TYPICAL USERS WONT NEED THIS
sudo mkdir /home/apt-mirror
sudo rm -Rf /var/spool/apt-mirror
sudo ln -s /home/apt-mirror /var/spool/apt-mirror

Step 3: Run apt-mirror
To have apt-mirror start downloading the repositories, run:

sudo apt-mirror /etc/apt/mirror.list
I recommend running this command overnight, as it will take several hours depending on your connection speed and what you setup to mirror. For example, my server is mirroring with the above configuration and downloaded around 35-40GB for i386 and AMD64. This took between 4-10 hours over my 10mbps cable connection.

Step 4: Install apache
For you to be able to use this local mirror normally, you will need a web server to share the directories. In this guide, I will use apache, but you may prefer to use lighthttpd or some other server.
sudo apt-get install apache2

sudo apt-get update
This should run the same as before we changed the file. Any errors will need to be addressed. Post a reply if you have any errors here.

You should also use this step on other machines you want to setup to use this mirror. You will just need to replace the 127.0.0.1 with the LAN address for machines over LAN or public IP for other machines over the net.

If you have questions, comments, suggestions, feel free to reply, send me a message on IRC (bmk789 on freenode), or send me an email (bmk789@gmail.com)